advice on buliding browser-based (non CHM) help system

[Suzette Leeming]

Hi Andrew,
Did you try posting your question at Help and Manual's forum?

(http://helpman.it-authoring.com/)
I find the users there are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.
Suzette Leeming

On 9/7/06, Andrew Strombeck <amstrombeck at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm new to this list, but have found it a rich resource in the past. Let me apologize in advance for the general nature of this question, but I'm having trouble finding a succinct answer elsewhere.
>
> I'm writing user docs for a browser-based application built in .NET. Since the application is for internal use, the developers have standardized on Internet Explorer.
>
> In lieu of using a full Microsoft CHM file, I want to write help as a series of HTML (or XML) pages. When called, these will display in a floating window that users can access without opening a new browser window (this part is taken care of by the developers, using something called RAD controls).
>
> Each page needs to display in a context-sensitive manner, i.e. when the user clicks a ? button on a form, help will return a topic related to that page. At the top of this page, I want to integrate a simple search that will look through all the help pages in a directory and return a list of pages with matching terms.
>
> I'm using Help and Manual as a development enviroment.Table of Contents isn't terribly important.
>
> I basically need advice on two things:
>
>   implementing context-sensitive help without using a CHM file and
>   implementing full-text search on the directory where I'll store my Help files
> Thanks in advance.
>